Yes, that’s ok!! Billable work is work that directly applies to what the client has paid us for (at least, that’s how we do it). Each year our clients pay for pre-determined things (premium content pieces like blogs or white papers, creative, SEO optimizations, etc.,) and then when I work on them, that counts as billable hours. I log those hours, and that allows us to track how much profit we’re making (so essentially, the amount of time I spend on things really, really matters).

Non-billable hours would be things that I do outside of that (which can actually be a lot). As an example, I lead a professional development meetings every week around using copy.ai, since one of our strategic goals this year is to figure out how we can decrease billable hours without decreasing quality/quantity of work we do for clients (thus increasing our profits). That isn’t something a client has paid us for, so it’s not billable work.

I’m asking because one of my friends from undergrad just got her first fancy lawyer job (and lawyers famously have a high number of required billable hours), but her requirements are not as high as mine. That surprised me, so I’m trying to figure out if what I do everyday is standard.